I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.

-Benjamin Disraeli

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.

-Willie Nelson

According to some of my Facebook friends, November is an unofficial month of gratitude, where each day a participating person is supposed to name the blessings in his or her life.  I’ve been hunting around on the Internet for the origin of this and can’t find it, so if anyone can point me to the source or a link that explains it, please do!

On a related note, last night at the monthly parenting group I attend by Betsy Brown Braun, we talked about the upcoming holiday season and how to find less materialistic ways to give to our families and make the season more meaningful.  Betsy had a number of suggestions, including making one of the kids’ presents a gift certificate to give to a charity of their choice or to Heifer International or World Visions.  Other charities like Mazon or Feeding America or organizations like the local Meals on Wheels are good choices, but those that allow kids to help other kids can foster empathy and make the giving feel more personal.  The point of it all, when it came to our kids and the holidays, was to take the excessive focus off the material goods and sensory comforts that give us pleasure for fleeting moments as we consume them.  Because, Betsy told us, gratitude is enhanced by verbal expressions of thanks, as when she encouraged us to have our kids lead up to Thanksgiving by naming what they appreciate in their own lives.  And gratitude is enhanced by doing things for other people in need.

With that in mind, I’m trying to find my gratitude this year.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong in my life that a few more hours of sleep each night and getting my 250-page manuscript out of my office won’t solve.  I’ve had an eventful, productive year.  None of my loved ones is deathly ill.  We know where our next meal is coming from, and we can make our mortgage payments.  I’m just tired, overworked, and sick of first- and second-draft writerly limbo.  I’m wrung out from caring too much about the recent presidential election and wish I had more help with my non-writerly responsibilities.  But I can’t help feeling like I’m missing the forest for the trees (I wish there was a non-cliched way to say that).  There have been times in my life, even in the recent years I was in mourning for my father, when I have felt buoyed by hope and gratitude at the holidays — if only the black comedic gratitude of knowing that my far-from-fun natal family has provided me with years of writing material.  So far, this is not one of those kinds of holiday seasons.

Having finished the first draft of my book, “The Rag and Bone Man,” this summer at VCCA was an incredible achievement.  Most of my frustration lies in now not having the unfettered time to finesse it well enough to send out to anyone else to read.  I won’t sport with your intelligence to enumerate the reasons I don’t have time to write.  But two of them are running and screaming with laughter through the house right now, since their school in on a series of “minimum days” for what seems like eternity during November.

So, with one week to go until Thanksgiving (and then the onslaught of Hanukah, Christmas, and New Years, with family visits and school vacations and the never-ending parade of office and school and family celebrations), I am trying to brace myself with a strong dose of authentic gratitude.  It’s always bittersweet because this is also the season, 12 years ago, when my father died.  His death, after decades of living in poverty with schizophrenia, was also what propelled me to write “The Rag and Bone Man.”  This morning before school the kids and I filled out a gift form for Meals on Wheels, and I plan to take Betsy up on some of her suggestions for family charity.  (I’d like to make it more of a family habit throughout the year, not just at the holidays.)

And as for the teeth-gnashing over the second draft of the manuscript?  Having just now written about the frustration, I already feel a little less ungrateful.

Last week, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported that racial attitudes have gotten worse, not better, since the United States elected its first African American president four years ago in 2008.  Those who admitted to having anti-African American feelings rose from 48% in 2008 to 51% in 2012.  If the researchers included implicit racist beliefs, the proportion rose from 49% in 2008 to 56% in 2012.  Anti-Hispanic attitudes surveyed in 2011 were reported at 52% (57% by the implicit racism criteria).  This is disheartening.  My social science-trained spouse believes that this is a suspect conclusion; he suggested that more people surveyed were willing to admit to racist attitudes than the people surveyed during the last presidential election.  I hope he is right.

The survey brought to mind not the small minority of white supremacists in America, or members of what the Southern Poverty Law Center refer to as the Patriot Movement, but what I imagine is the wide middle swath of people who wouldn’t dream of burning a cross on anyone’s front yard, or putting a  group of people in a concentration camp, but nonetheless harbor ideas that diverge significantly from the idea of Ebony and Ivory living together in perfect harmony.  Families like the one I grew up in.

My grandfather, a man whose memory I still revere for the selfless love he showed me as he helped raise me, was born in 1907 and brought up in a Swedish American home in Nebraska.  He moved to Wisconsin in the 1930s.  Most of my memories of him are happy ones — planting trees together on his farm, milling around his modest home while he made dinner at 5 pm on the dot for our family, listening as he hummed along to country songs by singers like Anne Murray.  But along with those are memories of him talking at the television as the NBC news broadcast images of Billy Carter and men with covered heads and dark glasses.

“Damned A-rabs!” he’d shout over the traditional, delicious meat-and-potatoes meal he’d just cooked, saying that whatever Billy Carter was doing, it was un-American — as un-American as whatever the hell “Hanoi” Jane Fonda had been doing in Vietnam a couple of decades earlier.  Just behind my grandpa, on the shelf that held little colored vases my grandma collected, was a certificate from the John Birch Society thanking him for his membership.  (Over the years as I have revisited my childhood dining room in my imagination, I have wanted to excise this – telling myself that I was mixing up “Birch” with the American Tree Farm certificate that stood nearby.  But alas, no; both pieces of paper were there, congratulating my grandpa for his patronage.)

My grandmother was born in 1908 in to a mixed European, mostly German-American Nebraska family.  I remember her as an outspoken, often overbearing woman with an impeccable coif, an ever-present cigarette — a tough-talking yet loving grandma.  When she watched the news over dinner with us, if there was a news story about dysentery in a foreign country, or teenage girls getting married, or one tribal group wiping out another, she would declare over the background sounds of Tom Brokaw and David Brinkley that she “thanked God in heaven that I was born White and American!”  Other times, when describing trips she had taken to big cities or people she had met in her life, she told us that “Black people have a different smell.”

You would think that having biracial grandchildren sitting there listening to this would have made my grandparents self-conscious.  You’d be wrong.  To them, they were simply stating the truth; and Black people were 100% different from Chinese people, who were only somewhat different from White people.  Their love for us, the products of my Caucasian mother’s brief marriage to my Chinese father, was separate from their ideas that their culture was the best.  (Of course, this also has to do with the benevolent racist assumptions of being Asian — my grandparents and many others believed that my brother and I were hard-wired for industriousness, love of the traditional family unit, and math.)

My mother didn’t say anything as outrageous as this when she was raising my brother and me.  But we grew up in an overwhelmingly Caucasian place, and it was hard to avoid the default settings of the implicit racism the overwhelming sea of Whiteness bred in us — where having “a Black friend” was supposed to be shorthand for “there’s no way I could be a racist!”  Etc.  I could tell stories about how she claims that if the perfect man happened into her life and was Black, she claims she would date/marry him, or about how she speaks warmly to the naturalized American citizen from Latin America who babysits my children and yet is adamant that illegal immigration from south of the border is a scourge and a danger to “our way of life.”

But I can’t quite bring myself to go there.  In an election year filled with racial and cultural innuendo (who is “one of us,” who is not), this all cuts too close to the bone for me.

I don’t claim to be fully evolved when it comes to racism.  I think of it as a journey rather than a destination.

Last week a 14-year-old Pakistani girl named Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban.  Her crimes, labeled “activism” by the monsters who tried to kill her and her female classmates, appears to be attending school and encouraging other girls to become educated.

This week, in my home state of Wisconsin, a man shot an entire beauty salon full of people in order to kill his estranged wife.  There was a similar salon shooting tragedy in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month, and another mass-fatality, domestic violence-related shooting last year in Seal Beach, California.

These incidents are related.  No, the Taliban didn’t shoot these American ex-wives and all their co-workers.  But the same mentality that declares schooling girls to be not only useless but a dangerous blasphemy is related to a culture where women are unsafe in their marriages and if they choose to end their marriage.  The same desire to control the minds and bodies of women and girls, coupled with the easy availability of guns all over the world, allows retaliation with high body counts when females step out of line.  It’s a slippery slope, I know, to talk about the safety and rights of women and girls, when I was the one who opted out of all but one college class in anything remotely “feminist” (a single women’s history class, which is the only reason I know the names of all the seminal texts — The Yellow Wallpaper, The Second Sex, etc — that I have yet to read).

But I did have three important learning experiences that shaped my view that education for girls and equality for women (which includes control of their own bodies and health, including access to birth control) are vital and interrelated, and can’t be taken for granted.  The first was the circumstances of my upbringing: my mother was in an abusive marriage to my father until I was six years old, and until my father’s death in 2000, even after he left the United States and moved back to Taiwan, she remained terrified of him.  I remember plenty of physical violence, but what also stands out in my memory is the steady stream of emotional and verbal abuse he hurled at her.  You can blame it on culture or family — my father was from a male-dominated, old-fashioned culture, in a patriarchal family, where other men also beat their wives.  You can blame it on the fact that my mother dropped out of college after only a year or so, at age 20, to get married, and then had a baby (me) in short order, and another one (my brother) when her marriage was falling apart, at age 25.  All of that contributed to the misery and intractable feel of our family situation and the poverty we experienced once my mother was out, sort of, from under the yoke of her abusive marriage.  Like the women who were murdered in all of the recent mass killings, my mother had a restraining order against my father.  But like the deceased women, my mother’s restraining order was a simple piece of paper against an abusive man’s rage — at worst, only as good as the paper they’re printed on.

The second experience came when I was in eighth grade.  My social studies teacher was an enthusiastic, articulate young man named Mr. Fisher.  We studied government and current events and the rest of the prescribed curriculum in 1984 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  One day during his lecture, Mr. Fisher told us that he didn’t understand why more girls didn’t go on to higher education.  As he recalled from his own childhood, the girls were the ones who were often “better at” school than the boys, and they had great contributions to make if only they would stick with their educations.  Of all the prosaic, throwaway bits of my adolescent school experience, this was a memorable moment — someone outside my family saying that girls should stay in school and go as far as their intellect and resources will allow.

The third experience was when I was in graduate school studying public health at UCLA.  My public health classes were all about math, biological pathways, risk factors, and assessing variables that I never before understood could be quantified.  In one class, a community health class outside my primary discipline of epidemiology, I was shocked to learn that infant mortality is related to lack of education in mothers.  In fact, the babies’ risk of dying decreased with each additional year their mothers had attended school.  It was a thunder clap, but also a moment of, ‘this is so obvious, it’s hard to break it down for anyone whose mindset prevents them from viewing women as an important half of the species rather than simply walking baby incubators.’

Knowing this makes it seem like basic species survival to send girls to school, and allow them to learn for a good, long time!  I’m not sure what to do about the problem of creating boys and men who view women as truly equal human beings.  I count myself lucky and smart to have married one; now I’m working on version 2.0 in raising my son.

It’s the most glorious time of the year in Minnesota, the cusp of autumn, with bright, still-long days, a warm but no longer humid breeze in the air with the green smell of trees and flowers still in bloom.  My family and I are visiting my brother and his family — his wife, toddler, newborn, and dog.  The house is full of chaos, toys, and love, not necessarily in that order.

And being around these half-gnawed-on pieces of toast and tiny bits of fruit, peeled just in time for a child to lose interest and walk away, reminds me of so much that I had already forgotten about what it’s like to have very young children.  My kids are almost seven and ten years old.  It’s been a few years since I’ve spent what feels like a lifetime within one day of wiping counters and spills and cleaning dishes, picking up toys, changing diapers, and trying to get at least one person (preferably two) to sleep for a little while.  I’m not at an age where these tasks feel like ancient history; my kids still make a huge mess.  But now they’re old enough to help clean up.  And they no longer eat like pint-sized Henry VIII’s in catch-all bibs, discarding half the meal onto the floor for the dogs to lap up as they flail about in highchairs.  I forget the visceral sense that raising babies and toddlers is a set of Sisyphean tasks contained in every day.  But then I’m around a baby and a toddler, my niece and nephew, both out of sorts because of colds and the oddity of visiting family members in the house, and it all comes back.

When I was with my own babies, I did find it meaningful.  But many days were unbearably long — like first-draft theater of the absurd with tiny, schmutzy people who said nothing that made any sense.  I felt like I would never have a thought to myself again, let alone write one down.  I was filled with the basic needs and preferences of other people.  It was overwhelming and often sucked.

One weekend, when my son was a baby and my daughter a toddler, I was invited to a party for a writers’ professional organization.  Eager to get out of my toy-littered, sticky, furry house, I accepted, even though I didn’t know anyone else in the group.  When I arrived, the pleasant hosts led me into their suburban home.  They were the parents of one grown child, and their house was clean — noticeably free of glittery art projects, stuffed animals, and board books.  Instead they had paintings on the wall, a sedate fish tank instead of floppy dog beds, a bookshelf full of reference books and novels.  They were medical writers, like me, and they seemed like a happy couple.  But as I looked around their house, I couldn’t help imagining how boring their life must be.  (And then I got a little irritated with myself, since my inner monologue was starting to sound like that crappy, women-belong-at-home-with-babies 80′s song, “I’ve Never Been to Me” — the one where the singer claims to have been to paradise, but never to herself, because she didn’t have children.)

In the years since I’ve had kids in preschool and diapers, I allowed myself to think that I’ve become something of a pro at aspects of parenting.  That my difficulties at the time were because I was young, inexperienced, sleep-deprived, and hadn’t learned to take the long view of parenting (and writing).  But when I spend time with a family with very young kids, and I try lamely to lend a hand with cleaning or cooking or wrangling, I realize that I’m no better at this small-scale version of “having it all” than I was in the recent past.  And that, even though it would be fun sometimes, I would sort of suck at the baby stages just as much now as I did then.

All this, and I also miss it so.

In January 2011 I had the honor of performing a personal essay I’d written in the Expressing Motherhood show in Los Angeles.  I’m happy to announce that I will be performing again in the upcoming September and October Expressing Motherhood show.  The Expressing Motherhood team has recently launched a blog featuring mothers and creativity, and this is the piece I wrote for them.  Enjoy!

http://expressingmotherhood.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/susan-sheu/

I’m posting a link to the recent Tumblr post I wrote for the soon-to-be-released book Dancing at the Shame Prom.  The book is a compilation of personal essays by some well-known writers and is coming out on September 11, 2012.  I am planning to buy it!  (To be clear: I’m not one of the authors of the book.)

The post that I wrote is an excerpt from my manuscript for “The Rag and Bone Man,” the memoir I’m working on.  Thank you for reading.

http://dancingattheshameprom.tumblr.com/post/30531155307/the-three-amigos

The following reminiscence is brought to you by my upcoming anniversary.  I’ve just finished writing a draft of a memoir, including some drama from 1997, and remembering that it was (for me, in the end) a very good year:

The artists’ residency is nearing the end.  With horses and panoramic views outside my writing studio window, I have almost forgotten the fabric of the daily grind in Los Angeles.  Soon enough the sound of traffic, which I will tell myself is soothing white noise, will greet me each day instead of the whinnying of horses and the buzz of cicadas and crickets.  I remember what day it is because I’ve remained a little too connected to the outside world, checking my email and texts frequently (but less so that I do at home, I hope).  With young children and a husband at home, it’s hard to pretend for very long that my life is anything other than elsewhere.  But my 15-year wedding anniversary is coming up later this week, and with a reminder from the news that yesterday (8/31) was the 15th anniversary of Princess Diana’ death, I am being pulled back into the stream of my life 15 years ago in Los Angeles

On the night that Princess Diana later died, my fiancé was on his way out to a bachelor party that his mostly single male friends had organized.  Because we were in our mid-20s and were Los Angeles transplants, the boys were keen on going full-cliché when it came to the bachelor party.  So they rented a limo, with all the accompanying libations, and proceeded on a tour of Hollywood’s finest (and probably some of the worst) “gentlemen’s clubs” and strip joints.  Cell phones were not common in those days, so I had to wait until the next day to hear all of the grubby details from my fiancé.  But apparently (and I believe him), the other “boys” were a lot more interested in the evenings’ proceedings that he was.

My friend Sarah had made the arrangements for my bachelorette party on the same night.  If this were a movie and you could track the two parties’ movements on a map, you might see that we began in the same part of town, Hollywood, but that the paths diverged after dinner.  The boys stayed in Hollywood, where most of what could be called “gentlemen’s clubs” are located.  The girls began in Hollywood, where we had too many margaritas at a Mexican restaurant in Los Feliz and tried to buy Brad Pitt a drink.  But the cocktail waitress shut us down, saying (rightly) that if she sent him a drink from a bunch of gigging girls, he would stop frequenting their establishment.  (This was so long ago that it was actually in the immediate post-Gwyneth, pre-Jennifer period!  He was technically available!)  We soon headed to West Hollywood, where the men who actually enjoy dancing are.

When the news broke that Princess Diana had died, we were in the midst of a thumping gay club in West Hollywood.  Anyone out in LA that night, indeed anywhere with a television, knew that she was in grave condition and not expected to live after her horrible car accident.  The music stopped, and the DJ announced her death.  All of us, the sweaty mass of gay men and the gussied-up girls who surround them, plus my mother – singular in the club in her conservative dress and her shock at the sexually explicit videos on the ubiquitous TVs, paused for a moment of silence.  Then, as if to honor the fallen princess, we all resumed dancing again.  If anything the dancing became more primal and intense to pay tribute to her glamorous memory, the beautiful girl bound by duty in a loveless marriage.

Later that week Mother Teresa would die, and many upstanding people would rightly complain that Diana’s death was overshadowing the loss of an authentically saintly woman.  The mature, right-thinking part of me agreed.  But it was the story of the luckless princess that stayed with me as, one week later, I wore my own tiara and married for love.

The Hipstamatic app on my phone really does nothing to soothe my overdeveloped sense of pathos and tragedy.  Neither does that beautiful, damnable song “We Are Young” by the appropriately named band, Fun.

I’m going to a writers colony exactly one month from today, something I waited and worked hard to apply for.  Several years ago, when my older child was two years old, I began an application to this same writers retreat.  In retrospect the timing would not have worked out well because I was just finished nursing her and found out I was pregnant again.  So, had I been accepted, I would have spent part of the summer sweating in Virginia and about to deliver a baby with toddler in her terrible twos at home.  But I chose to withdraw my application and often kicked myself over the years as the book I’ve been writing on and off for nine years stalled and stopped.  I had intermittent freelance paid work as a writer and was grateful for it, but none of it helped me finish my book.  I took writing classes and joined writers groups when I could find the time and good companions and teachers.  Sometimes in the course of the classes and groups I would stumble upon a Big Idea that would help my book.  In the last couple of years I have kept my book alive by performing in writers and storytelling venues like Expressing Motherhood, Spark Off Rose, and the Moth.  But all in all, my writing process for the last near-decade has been the equivalent of Slow Food.  Only I think even Slow Food purists would find my process maddeningly slow, like being hungry for apple pie and then deciding I must first grow an apple tree.

So now I’m finally off to be a writing fellow at VCCA.  A part of me is thrilled and feels like I’m getting away with something!  But another part of me is worried that I won’t produce good work, worried that my home and family will go to hell in a hand basket, and sad that I’m missing a month of my children’s lives.  They are now nine and half and six and a half years old.  My husband is supportive and able, and my mother will be helping him while I’m gone.  This is a Hipstamatic picture I snapped of them at the beach in Los Angeles on Fathers Day.  The moment I saw it, I knew that Hipstamatic is made for artsy saps like me at moments like this.  Like that mournful, danceable party song, “We Are Young,” it taps into the sense of small moments — like kids frolicking in the waves, or youngsters declaring that they would carry a tired friend or lover home from a bar — becoming faded, water-stained memories before you can take your next breath.  That’s me to a T, even before the impending artists fellowship, sucking the marrow out of every little thing of beauty, like a high-functioning mourner suffering from never-ending hypomania whenever I find a Perfect Moment.

This goes back to my overdeveloped sense of pathos and tragedy, and it’s one of the important reasons I have to finish my book and deal with the fact that the best thing to do is to go away and think and write.  My manuscript, “The Rag and Bone Man,” is about the effect my father (and mother) had on my life.  I can’t put it into an easy nutshell (or I would have already sold it).  But it concerns loss and death and disease and dysfunction and disappointment and loving people anyway and trying to find meaning and beauty and repair things and make the best of what you have left.  (Or, to paraphrase my husband when he convinced me to have children in the first place, “Don’t you want to do better than the shit you were given?”)

Yes, but that’s a tall order.

I sort of recall the day my mother tried to tell me about “the facts of life,” or the ones that pertained to the getting a period.  She had sent away for the Modess kit of visual aids and granny maxi pads with an elastic belt that girls were supposed to wear under their gigantic underpants.  On the allotted day, which she must have dreaded, she sat me down on the scratchy, green couch.  I’m sure she was praying that my grandpa wouldn’t walk in mid-speech.  I was 11 years old, and what I mainly remember from “the talk” was that soon I would start bleeding.  My mom giggled while trying to tell me that it was the start of something wonderful.

But the granny pads and bizarre elastic girdle, like a highly ineffectual chastity belt, told another story — one that eluded larger meaning in favor of paper products and talk of “that time of the month.”  I don’t blame my mom for failing to come up with an evolved and comprehensive approach; it was 1980, and she was a 32-year-old single mom with two young kids and not much of a road map other than a mishmash of Redbook and textbooks that she fell asleep reading after her long day at work and in college classes.

The person who actually told me where babies came from was my best friend Amy.  We were both six years old, hanging out on my candy-striped swing set.  She had three older brothers, and there wasn’t much she didn’t know.  I was indignant when she explained baby-making to me.  I might have even called her a liar.  Still, the utterly bizarre mechanics she had described stayed with me, and the story must have been part of the fetid soup of embarrassing period stories, adolescent hormones, and clandestine, 1980s R-rated movies that helped me eventually put the pieces together by the time I was a teenager.

All of this was on my mind last month when Betsy Brown Braun, who facilitates my monthly parenting group, spoke about “the facts of life.”  She said that if by the age of six, a child hadn’t heard some realistic version of “where babies come from” from his parent, he will have heard it from someone else.  This was sobering and implied a whole cascade of trust and truthfulness that could be initiated or evaded as a result.  Prior to hearing this, I had vague notions of talking about X and Y chromosomes or animal babies or a similar wishy-washy conversation with my older child, who is nine years old.  I left class with the sex talk much higher on my parenting agenda.

Out of respect for my kids’ future ability to search the Internet, I’m not going to delve into the conversations in detail.  We spoke with them one by one.  My daughter, the nine-year-old, had to be almost physically restrained to stay in the room while we spoke.  My husband and I sounded like stereotypes of open-minded parents, covering the bases and forcing ourselves not to laugh while she averted her eyes and claimed to know everything already.  My son, the six-year-old, looked horrified when I talked turkey with him.  I took off from his “kissing in movies is so gross” statement to segue into “where babies come from.”  It was like the kindergarten version of the scene in “American Pie” when Eugene Levy talks to his son about sex: cringeworthy, but hey, now that’s out of the way.  (And to my mild credit, I didn’t muck it up so badly.  He’s had a lot of questions since then, most kind of gross and out of left field.)

I don’t know if I did the right thing, or if I did it in the right way.  But as a parent and a writer, I do buy into the whole “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” romantic ideal.  May my fumbling attempt be sufficient.

My first work-study job in as a freshman in college was at the school library.  I worked at the front desk checking out books.  As work-study jobs go, I could have done a lot worse.  It was 1987, and we still used a paper system to loan books.  I’d ask for my fellow students’ ID, stamp dates on cards in the book pockets, and file the cards.  Sometimes I pushed a cart around the beautiful, Gothic building, and picked up books to be re-shelved.

Once the librarian knew me well enough to trust my dexterity with the Dewey Decimal System, she even allowed me to shelve stray books where they belonged.  Little did she know I had won the coveted “library skills” prize in my eighth grade English class!  (Actually, she probably did know.  And I’m kidding about the “coveted” part too.  I was a chatterbox and eager to prove myself.  Ever since that debacle in junior high, when I had borrowed too many books from my hometown library and submitted to a “talking to” by the head librarian in exchange for a reduced fine, I wanted to prove myself worthy to the mythic, archetypal librarian.)

One of my favorite off-hours work was repairing books.  Before working in a library, I didn’t realize that books sometimes fell apart, their covers ripping or the binding becoming unreliably loose.  I treated my own books, and any books I borrowed from the library, well.  Now that I was in college, some of the most well-worn books from the long lists of required and suggested reading on our course syllabi were on heavy rotation, particularly around midterms and finals.

I was apprehensive when the librarian first showed me how to fix a book.  (I was never handling any rare books, just paperbacks and musty secondary source volumes from the 1940s and 1950s — analyses of the Franco-Prussian War, Queen Victoria, the history of Judaism, and arcana on all liberal arts subjects.)  Most repairs, she explained, could be done with clear tape.  She whipped out a roll of packing tape, eyeballed the distance from the top margin to the bottom of a yellowing hardcover, and carefully lay half of the tape the long way along the inside cover.  She squeezed the craggy, torn binding close to the front page, and pressed the other half of the tape along the front page.  Later she showed me her method of repairing a paperback.  She just repeated her handiwork along the edge of the outside cover.

It was so simple, but once I learned how to do it, it reminded me of crocheting or knitting — satisfying, slightly physical, and precise, the way fussy kids who enjoy working in a library like their busywork.  These days I’m a compulsive fixer of the books my kids borrow from their teachers.  The book pictured, MATILDA by Roald Dahl, has come home in my daughter’s backpack at least twice this year.  She loves it and can’t believe that I still haven’t read it.  (She knows I loved CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH when I was a kid.)  And at nine years old, she’s already re-reading her favorite books.

I’ve also repaired large-scale illustrated books on the finer points of Star Wars and the intricacies of Harry Potter.  And my kids seem to think it’s both bizarre and awesome that I know how to fix books.